PgAdminIII did/does have the facility to edit the postgresql.conf & pg_hba.conf. However, as David G. Johnston pointed out, it was limited to editing _local_ versions of those files.
No it wasn't. There were separate menu options for remote editing...
>i don't recommend doing this by hand, ... That statement implies that you feel that using a GUI will protect you from making errors. That is untrue. If you use a GUI to change the authentication method in the pg_hba.conf (not to mention other critical parameters), you could easily lock out many users upon reloading/restart. Likewise, the same applies for changing values in postgresql.conf. Simply having an easy way to change values does not mean you will
be protected from setting them too high(or wrong). EG: setting work_mem to 1GB will be
very bad.
It is better to learn and understand WHY you need to change values, than just having an easy way to do so.
...but you are otherwise correct - it was potentially dangerous and you could easily break a system doing it. It was also quite fragile, as it required the adminpack package which it used to completely re-write the config files, which had to be manually parsed and re-generated in order to (attempt) to keep any comments etc.
